Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(61)

“They’ve replaced everything with everything else,” said Zhang He. “I haven’t done a cipher since I was little. They get tedious too fast.”

“Meaning you were pretty good at it, but when you deciphered them the messages weren’t worth the work.”

“‘A stitch in time saves nine.’”

“‘All’s well that ends well,’” said Dabeet. “I only wish that were true.”

“Who’s the message from, really?” asked Zhang He.

“I told you, my—”

“Mother, right, only you wouldn’t stay up all night deciphering a puzzle that probably says ‘big loves and hugs’ in two languages.”

Dabeet closed his eyes. Now he was so tired he could drop off to sleep in a moment if he didn’t work at staying awake. He was not going to make a good decision here. Decisions made on the edge of sleep were usually a mistake. Did that mean that he should think of what he really thought he should do, and then do the opposite?

“It might be a life and death message,” Dabeet said, not knowing whether he was doing what he thought he ought to, or the opposite, or just being impulsive.

“Is that American exaggeration, or real?”

“I’m not all that American,” said Dabeet. “I’m from the barrio.”

Zhang He shrugged. “I’m a Chinese Christian, which means I’m not Chinese, I’m not Lunar, most other Christians wouldn’t think me Christian, so I’m not anything.”

“I’m saying it’s life and death.”

“Whose?” asked Zhang He.

“My mother’s. When it was announced that I was accepted to Fleet School, it was in the papers and Mother’s friends spread it through our church group. So then I’m at school, and out of the blue—literally—come these guys in uniform, pretend they’re from my father in the Fleet, and in a minute I’m aboard a private airplane heading south by south-southeast over the Caribbean. Kidnapped.”

Zhang He looked at Dabeet intently. Dabeet knew that he was deciding whether to believe this story or not.

“I’m not important, we don’t have any money. What we had was me going to Fleet School, and that’s what they wanted. I’m supposed to do something up here, or they’ll hurt my mother.”

“And by ‘hurt’ you mean ‘kill.’”

“I don’t mean anything. They mean it. And yes, probably that’s what they mean. The idea is that if I don’t follow their orders…”

“Orders to do what?” Zhang He asked.

“It’s a puzzlement,” said Dabeet.

It took Zhang a moment to realize that Dabeet was referring back to the enciphered message. “é, I can see how that might give you a sense of urgency about deciphering it. Only I wonder if they’d be happy to know that you told me about them. The point of a cipher is to keep the wrong people from reading it.”

“They’ll never know,” said Dabeet.

“Come on, if they’re planning to do something inside Fleet School, they probably have spies up here,” said Zhang.

Dabeet couldn’t tell if Zhang was joking. “They do,” he finally said, “and it’s me.”

“Oh,” said Zhang. “But nothing is happening here. It’s a school.”

“Hence the need for a message.”

Zhang looked at it again. “It doesn’t look like it’s divided into two languages.”

“It wouldn’t, it’s enciphered.”

“No, they’d look different. Languages look like themselves, even if they’re in cipher.”

“They do when you can see where the words divide,” said Dabeet. “Or even which direction the lines run. Up and down? Diagonal? Boustrophedon? Maybe I can do it with a brute-strength attack, taking each possible orientation in turn, and trying to make sense of it letter by letter, guessing Spanish or English. The puzzle isn’t all that long. If I work on nothing else, by my rough guess I could solve it in about three weeks. I just don’t know if I have three weeks. If my mother has three weeks.”

“It came on paper,” said Zhang, “so it can’t be too urgent.”

“The shuttle schedules are known. They could have sent it to arrive just in time for whatever it is they want me to do.”

“Have you told the commandant about this?” asked Zhang He.

Dabeet noticed that when Zhang was thinking of her as someone who might help solve Dabeet’s problem, he called her by her title rather than “Urska Kaluza,” as the students mostly did when she wasn’t present.

“Not about the message, but about my mother’s jeopardy, yes,” said Dabeet. “She didn’t believe me. Or pretended not to. For all I know, she’s in collusion with the smugglers and the terrorists, and they only need me so they’ll have a fall guy.”

“Fall guy?”

“Someone they can blame no matter how it turns out.”

“You said ‘terrorists.’ Kidnapping, spying, but … how are they terrorists?”

He wasn’t ready to tell Zhang that they wanted Dabeet to open the outside door of Fleet School Station to their raiding party. So Dabeet only shook his head. “They’re terrorizing me.”